Essential Things Quotes

1. "Essential to life, is desiring the things that you need, than needing the things you desire."
Author: Anthony Liccione

2. "I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things."
Author: Bertrand Russell

3. "Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval—a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old—and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers."
Author: Bill Bryson

4. "I used to go to the comic store all the time. I was into comic cards, which are essentially baseball cards for comic book heroes. They have these cool stats on the back. I had collections of these things. I still have a lot of my collection at home."
Author: Brett Dalton

5. "Brother, when you've been here as long as I have, you'll come to discover there are only one or two essential things worth living for. Unique to you and you alone. My honor is one of them for me. I keep my honor by keeping the relic out of their hands."
Author: Brodi Ashton

6. "Paint the essential character of things."
Author: Camille Pissarro

7. "Waiting is one of the things that humans beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried. If we are good at waiting, we discover that what we wanted of the future, in our impatience, is no longer what we want, that waiting has brought wisdom. I have become good at waiting, as I wait to see what action or sacrifice is wanted of me, wait to discover where I must go next, and wait for the day when the fortuneteller's promise will be fulfilled. Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting."
Author: Dean Koontz

8. "Although a food processor is not an absolutely essential piece of equipment, because you can certainly chop, grate, slice, knead and mix everything by hand, it does do all these things very quickly and efficiently and saves you time and energy."
Author: Delia Smith

9. "Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences."
Author: Dennis Lehane

10. "Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him."
Author: Diana Abu Jaber

11. "She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things."
Author: Diana Athill

12. "To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depths of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom."
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

13. "I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?"
Author: Don DeLillo

14. "The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it."
Author: Evelyn Waugh

15. "I can't ever seem to shake the feeling that when things are really good it essentially means that things are going to go really bad. When I feel calm and settled, there is always an underlying feeling of impending doom... I don't think that it's healthy."
Author: Florence Welch

16. "For me, style is essentially doing things well. If you want to be outrageous, be outrageous with style. If you want to be restrained, be restrained with style. One can't specifically define style. It's like the perfume to a flower. It's a quality you can't analyze."
Author: Francoise Gilot

17. "Often they descended to their grave with an ironic smile – for what was there left of them to bury! Only the dross, refuse, vanity, animality that had always weighed them down and that was now consigned to oblivion after having for long been the object of their contempt. But one thing will live, the monogram of their most essential being, a work, an act, a piece of rare enlightenment, a creation: it will live because posterity cannot do without it. In this transfigured form, fame is something more than the tastiest morsel of our egoism, as Schopenhauer called it: it is the belief in the solidarity and continuity of the greatness of all ages and a protest against the passing away of generations and the transitoriness of things."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "Already at the age of sixteen I wondered at them gloomily; I was amazed at the pettiness of their minds, the stupidity of their activities, games, and conversations. They were so lacking in understanding of the most essential things, so devoid of interest in the most important, most remarkable matters, that I involuntarily began to look upon them as my inferiors."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19. "No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

20. "Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.[...]We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
Author: Gene Wolfe

21. "Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things."
Author: Gustave Courbet

22. "If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better."
Author: Hanif Kureishi

23. "The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything."
Author: Hermann Hesse

24. "I think that just because the show is titled 'Awkward Black Girl' and it is a predominantly black cast doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to relate to these people. We're all human beings. We all essentially go through the same things when it comes down to it, so I don't I think that should limit who watches it."
Author: Issa Rae

25. "If you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo did. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there.-- (J.R.R. Tolkien to W.H. Auden, June 7, 1955.)"
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

26. "My life is essentially not so unique. On some deeper levels we feel the same, we know the same things. Therefore if I show my life 365 days, moments from those days, it will reflect and it will have connection with lives of all of us."
Author: Jonas Mekas

27. "We're so caught up in trying to do everything, experience all the essential things, not miss out on anything important...We can't read all the good books, watch all the good films, go to all the best cities in the world, try all the best restaurants, meet all the great people...Life is better when we don't try to do everything. Learn to enjoy the slice of life you experience, and life turns out to be wonderful."
Author: Leo Babauta

28. "You have to go where the story is to report on it. As a journalist, you're essentially running to things that other people are running away from."
Author: Lester Holt

29. "In a human development sense, our understanding of leadership has essentially "grown up" and moved past personal ego and a self-centered view of things."
Author: Linda Fisher Thornton

30. "Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way."
Author: Marilyn French

31. "Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD."
Author: Marilyn Johnson

32. "After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, "All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before." Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions--from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate--are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation."
Author: Marina Gorbis

33. "Cynicism is overrated, and far too easy. In small doses, cynicism--like irony--provides an essential tempering quality. But to wallow in it, and to dismiss things like hope and faith, is cowardly and unoriginal."
Author: Michael Perry

34. "Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things."
Author: Michael Cunningham

35. "So I was just thinking about how something happened today and it was quite insightful, humbling and puts things into perspective. If you look at anything, everything has it's 'story' so to speak. For instance, for me to even write this status requires an obscene amount of processes (essentially limitless). Just the biological processes that have to take place are in the trillions. Then you add the technological component, the psychology behind it(self-awareness/consciousness). Then you start looking at the macro factors behind it which include how I came into existence, how life came to be for that to occur, how earth came to be, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy, universe...etc. So the odds for all those things to occur for me to write a simple (or not so simply) status like this....is pretty fucking incredible to say the least."
Author: Michael R. Kitay

36. "We do not work for unity; we work to end and erase disunity. Unity is of God; disunity is of man. In matters of doctrine and practice of conscience, our guide should be this traditional saying: "In essentials, unity. In nonessentials, liberty. But in all things, love."
Author: Mike Timmis

37. "Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about."
Author: Mukesh Ambani

38. "...we have been content to drivel along with our current educational systems, most of which neglect all the essential things and leave their victims for all intents and purposes quite untrained. - Aldous Huxley, 1934"
Author: Nicholas Murray

39. "There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more."
Author: Paula McLain

40. "Essentially, when we run a deficit, we are borrowing money to buy things that are made overseas."
Author: Peter DeFazio

41. "In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place - yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do - yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads! I need - more desperately than my children need me - a way of seeing in the dark."
Author: Peter Shaffer

42. "For at this point one would arrive at the act of thinking of it (evil, i.e. ?a???) as if to be disproportion in regards to proportion, and limitlessness in regards to limit, formlessness in regards to the one-shaping-the-forms, always wanting in self-sufficiency, always indefinite, no where having a place to situate itself, wholly passive, insatiable absolute poverty; and these things above have not been corresponding to it, but as if the true essential being of it is these things, and what is it but all these things."
Author: Plotinus

43. "You haven't lost Iraki, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You'll see visions of him wherever you go. You'll see his eyes so moist, his intentions so blinding, you'll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.'Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.'"
Author: Rana Dasgupta

44. "Are there so many fascinating, exciting things to do or so many challenges pressing down upon you that it is hard to keep focused on that which is essential? When things of the world crowd in, all too often the wrong things take highest priority. Then it is easy to forget the fundamental purpose of life. Satan has a powerful tool to use against good people. It is distraction. He would have good people fill life with 'good things' so there is no room for the essential ones. Have you unconsciously been caught in that trap?"
Author: Richard G. Scott

45. "Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow."
Author: Richard Mitchell

46. "Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here: "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity." That is second-half-of-life, hardwon wisdom."
Author: Richard Rohr

47. "Those who make compassion an essential part of their lives find the joy of life. Kindness deepens the spirit and produces rewards that cannot be completely explained in words. It is an experience more powerful than words. To become acquainted with kindness one must be prepared to learn new things and feel new feelings. Kindness is more than a philosophy of the mind. It is a philosophy of the spirit."
Author: Robert J. Furey

48. "In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas" (In essentials unity, in doubtful things/non-essentials liberty, in all things charity). -Often attributed to John Wesley."
Author: Rupertus Meldenius

49. "In the things that really matter--our covenants, the commandments, and following the prophet--we need to be completely united. In the non-essentials, we have our agency to handle things as we see fit. But, in all things, regardless of whether we make the same choices or not, we are to treat each other with dignity and respect, both of which are evidences of charity in our hearts and lives."
Author: Sheri L. Dew

50. "The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919"
Author: Wallace Stevens

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